April 2008

Why does coffee leave rings?

April 25, 2008

You know how you spill coffee, you don’t just get a uniform stain? Instead, you get a stain with a dark ring around the edge. In the image to the left, you can see this in the coffee “blotches” (the round rings are caused by the coffee that was stuck to the bottom of the [...]

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Myth 5: How do airplanes fly?

April 18, 2008

No, the myth isn’t that airplane fly at all — we know they do, but how do they do it? This is one that really bothered a bunch of us when we were in graduate school in physics. How does an airplane fly? I have a substantial investment in knowing that the physics of these [...]

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Stringing us along…

April 18, 2008

I’ve got a new podcast episode… In this episode one of the teachers in our teacher workshops showed us one of his favorite activities, using the sound of paperclips (attached at intervals on a string) to estimate the rate of free fall. It’s a really elegant little experiment! Click this link to check it out: [...]

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Myth 4: No two snowflakes are the same shape

April 12, 2008

Gosh, I’d like to believe this one, it’s just such a “cool” idea. One argument against this idea is that if you take thousands of pictures of snowflakes, it’s still not a very good statistical sample. Kenneth Fuller writes about this, and other modern myths taught as science. He hypothesized that this myth arose from [...]

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When Words Fail You

April 12, 2008

Hi everyone, I posted an episode to my podcast, Science Teaching Tips. Click this link to check it out: 35. When Words Fail You – Stephanie

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Myth 3: Does water swirl counter-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere?

April 6, 2008

The answer: yes and no. When applied to toilets and sinks, this is one of those “too good to be true” science factoids, I’m afraid. But it does apply in some situations. The myth goes that if you flush a toilet in Australia the water swirls down the drain the opposite way than in the [...]

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Sound Bytes

April 6, 2008

I’ve posted a new episode to my podcast, Science Teaching Tips. I’ve always been fascinated with sound — there are a lot of neat things you can do with sound, and some little known facts. This podcast is a bit of a smattering of some of the fun things I found out about sound while [...]

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